OpenReach woes

[nowster]

Ever been in a situation where you know far more than the repair person that was sent out to fix a problem?

The story so far...

At 06:25:15.8 on Saturday morning, the router here got a PPPoE LCP TermReq packet from the OpenReach end. That's the equivalent of the far end saying it's hanging up the connection.

Our router then periodically sent out PPPoE Discovery packets (PADI) and got no response at all.

I noticed things were wrong at 8am and rang IDNet who agreed that the session had died and their RADIUS (authentication and session accounting server) logged a weird error.

I'd done all the kit swapping dance, changing everything to a previously "known good" setup. No dice.

IDNet raised a fault with OpenReach who duly sent an engineer this morning (Tuesday). Engineer wanted to know where the BT HomeHub was and whether it was showing a blue light.

Eventually he swapped out the ONT (which I knew would be pointless) and declared it not his problem. Second level said they could see a trickle of activity (but not what it was).

Interestingly they let slip we're the only user on that PON circuit (ie. uncontended access to that fibre).

So, it's back with IDNet's network people to find out what's wrong.

The daft thing is that this sort of thing used to be my job. I used to run an ISP and have done everything from liaising with BT management to pulling an all-nighter to find (and fix) a bug in the LCP (Link Control Protocol) layer programming of a PPP-over-L2TP Network Server.

That bit of tech hasn't changed in the 16 years since I've been out of it. It's PPPoE on VDSL or FTTP nowadays rather than PPPoA on ADSL.

I've even got better kit than them to diagnose the problem at this end. The OpenReach engineer really ought to have been provided with an Ethernet protocol sniffer box as standard kit.

They had no means of checking anything beyond the self-diagnostics provided by the ONT, and were completely thrown by anything that didn't look like a BT Homehub.

Anyway, spleen vented. The ball's back in IDNet's court for their network team to diagnose the problem.

[zappaDPJ]

Ever been in a situation where you know far more than the repair person that was sent out to fix a problem?

I get that feeling every time I visit my GP

Fingers crossed someone stumbles into the issue and gets it fixed!  

[Simon]

It does seem as though whenever there's a problem, the various providers of the associated services have a compulsory obligation to first blame the end user's equipment, then each other, before looking closer to home for what the issue may be. 

[nowster]

And it's back. I didn't touch anything here.

Phoning up IDNet to thank them it appears it's likely to have been a "stuck session".

That's a phrase I hadn't heard since when the ISP I was at was providing ADSL using a BT-supplied "home gateway" (ie. LNS) nearly twenty years ago.